Content ideas

What it's for

When you don't know what to post, a concrete idea gets creativity going again. Adapt each prompt to your topic and audience.

Tip

Keep a list of the ideas you like most: you'll always have content ready on «empty» days.

A block is not a lack of ideas

People stuck in front of a blank page nearly always already have the ideas: what is missing is a criterion for choosing and permission to publish something imperfect. That is why any prompt gets things moving again: it does not add an idea, it removes the decision.

The proof is that hardly anyone runs out of things to say when somebody asks them a question. Hence the most useful habit: keeping an open list to throw prompts into as they arrive — a question received, a mistake seen, a thing learned — instead of hunting for them at the moment of publishing.

The four things you can publish

Practically everything falls into four families. Teach: how something is done, what to avoid, what it costs. Show: behind the scenes, work in progress, the result. Tell: a mistake, a decision, a change. Ask: an opinion, a preference, advice.

The fourth is the one hardly anybody uses and the most effective for building an audience, because it is the only one where the other person has something to do. And the third is the one people remember, because it is the only one with somebody inside it: the posts that stay are nearly always the ones where something went wrong.

Something that works gets done again

The idea that every post has to be new is why so many people stop. People who work well do the opposite: when a piece works, they redo it in another format — the same subject as a video, as an image, as a list — and republish it a few months later, because the audience has changed and hardly anyone had seen it.

It is also worth looking backwards rather than forwards: your most viewed content from last year tells you what interests the people following you, and it is a list of already validated subjects. It is the most reliable source of ideas there is, and it requires no inspiration.

The calendar, and why consistency beats quality

On almost every platform a regular rhythm, even a modest one, produces more results than a series of peaks followed by months of silence: both because the audience gets used to it and because you need volume to learn what works. With four posts a year you learn nothing.

The practical way to keep it is producing in batches: preparing five pieces in one session costs far less than five sessions of one, because the time goes into getting yourself into working condition. And it is the only defence against the bad week, which always comes.

Nearby tools

For the texts there are Caption generator and Bio generator, for the limits Character counter by platform. For videos Title generator and Video thumbnail.